When a business is running well, there will be plenty of customers at the ready, asking questions and hoping for assistance. This is a good thing — it means that your company is successful, and perhaps even expanding. But it does present a certain problem: how do you answer questions at all hours of the day and night? How do you provide your customers with great customer service after hours? Many business owners, unfortunately, simply set up answering machines or automated answering services. The former is incredibly ineffective, as most callers will simply get frustrated and not leave a message at all. In fact, 80% of callers would rather hang up than leave a message for a business when directed to voicemail. The latter option is a bit better, but not by much; automated responses often can’t handle the issues that callers are worried about. What this means in the long term is that your company might lose some of its hard-earned good reputation, and maybe even some business. This is why many businesses in this day and age utilize telephone answering services. Telephone answering services provide outsourced employees who can answer calls at all hours. But it can be difficult to trust your company with a call answering service — why not just hire your own telephone answering employees permanently? Below, we’ll look into some the advantages in using professional telephone answering services.
1. Availability
The fact is that it can be difficult to find people who are willing to answer telephone at all hours of the night. It’s not an easy position to fill, and you may find yourself wasting time on an employee hunt that will end up being fruitless. Telephone answering services specialize in training people who are available for those hours — and as the job can be remotely-sourced, some do this by employing people from different time zones. This means that a shift that would be inconvenient for an employee in your area turns out to be fine for someone else. Because live answering services employ dozens — sometimes even hundreds — of people at a time, there will always be someone available to take your customers’ calls.
2. Professionalism
You may be an expert in your particular field, but that doesn’t mean you’re ready to train people to provide customer service over the phone. Live answering services specialize in training employees to handle a variety of different situations — for a number of different clients. For example, a customer service specialist who is properly trained specialist will just as easily be able to handle a call for a medical office as they would a retail establishment. There’s a reason why customer service over the phone has a higher rate of customer satisfaction compared to other online customer service channels, at 60%. For that matter, 80% of consumers prefer to contact customer service over the phone. Talking to people about problems over the phone can be frustrating or nerve-wracking, and you don’t want to leave it to someone who is inexperienced. With the best over-the-phone customer service specialists often preferring to work for live answering services, the fact is that you will likely have to work with these services to work with the best people. This is very much a real job, and you don’t want to have to handle it yourself or leave it to someone who simply wants to pick up extra hours at work.
3. Customer Satisfaction
As we mentioned before, most consumers prefer to contact customer service over the phone. It’s more convenient for them, more comfortable, and simply something that they can do whenever they want — unlike walking into a store in person. People appreciate being able to contact customer service at all hours of the day and night, and will come away from the experience of talking to a real person more satisfied than they would be if they were dealing with machines.